Barack Obama test drives a new slogan on Monday when he heads out west on the
latest leg of his unofficial re-election campaign.

It is “We Can’t Wait”, as in, the American people can’t wait for Republicans to do something about chronic unemployment by passing the US president’s $447 million jobs bill.

As November 2012 begins to loom large on the horizon, Mr Obama is searching for a catchphrase that captures his argument that if only the Republicans would put country first (a slogan used in vain by Senator John McCain) and politics second, then America could begin to turn the corner.

Obama’s problem is that there are two basic messages in election politics – “it’s time for change” or “don’t rock the boat”.

In 2008, he won an emphatic victory making a case for something new, when almost everything about him was different from George W Bush. He was well served by the simple slogans of “hope and change” and “Yes we can!”

But as the incumbent in 2012, the change argument is not available to him, so he has to persuade the electorate that stability is best.

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This is hard to do when unemployment has been stuck at 9.1 percent for two years – and that is just the official rate – you are promoting your fourth futile scheme to stem the foreclosure crisis and even your own economists don’t think anything much will improve before election day.

Obama knows he will get no help from the Republicans. Their self-confessed priority is to make him a one-term president. They have calculated that refusing to cooperate on job creation, even when many of the ideas in the bill are Republican ideas, is worth the risk of being punished by some voters for putting their electoral ambition first. It is they who are prepared to wait.